recovery | ConservationBytes.com

When human society breaks down, wildlife suffers

22 01 2015

Global human society is a massive, consumptive beast that on average degrades its life-support system. As we’ve recently reported, this will only continue to get worse in the decades to centuries to come. Some have argued that as long as we can develop our societies enough, the impact of this massive demographic force can be lessened – a concept described by the environmental Kuznets curve. However, there is little evidence that negative societal impact on the environment is lessened as per capita wealth exceeds some threshold; unfortunately environmental damage tends to, on average, increase as a nation’s net wealth increases. That’s not to say that short-term improvements cannot be achieved through technological innovation – in fact, they will be essential to offset the inexorable growth of the global human population.

So poor nations as well as the wealthy ones are responsible for environmental damage. Poorer nations often have ineffective governance systems so they fail to enforce compliance in environmental regulations, but wealthier nations often exploit a high proportion of their natural resources, with the inevitable environmental damage this entails. In some cases however, biodiversity can temporarily escape some of the ravages of society because humans either perceive the area to be too dangerous, or otherwise have no incentive to go there. There are some good examples of the latter, such as the vicinity around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor that melted down in 1986, or the Korean demilitarised zone.

In this vein, I just stumbled across an extremely interesting paper today published online early in Conservation Biology that describes trends in charismatic wildlife (i.e., big mammals) as the former Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and societal breakdown ensued. The authors had access to an amazing dataset that spanned the decade prior to the collapse, the decade immediately following, and a subsequent decade of societal renewal. What they found was fascinating. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: collapse, exploitation, human population, over-population, Population, recovery, Russia, society, socio-political collapse, Soviet union, trends, turmoil, wildlife
Categories : agriculture, anthropocene, conservation, decline, environmental policy, exploitation, governance, habitat loss, harvest, human overpopulation, mammal, population dynamics, Russia, threatened species

Tropical forest resilience depends on past disturbance frequency

16 07 2014

I’ve recently come across an interesting study that perfectly marries palaeo-ecological data with modern conservation philosophy. It’s not often that such a prehistorical perspective dating at least to the Last Glacial Maximum has been used so effectively to inform future conservation outlooks. I’m particularly interested in this sort of approach considering my own palaeo dabblings of late.

Published in Nature Communications this May, Lydia Cole and colleagues’ paper Recovery and resilience of tropical forests after disturbance is a meta-analysis of 71 studies covering nearly 300 disturbance events in tropical forests over the last 20,000 years or so. Using fossil pollen records as an index of vegetation change, they demonstrated the (somewhat intuitive) main result that the time to recovery following a disturbance generally decreases as the past disturbance frequency increased.

This appears to be a vindication of the idea that a system’s adaptive strategies evolve as a product of the local disturbance regime. More importantly, they found that recovery was faster following ‘large infrequent events’, which are natural perturbations such as cyclones and major fires. While most past disturbances were caused by humans clearing forest, the fact that tropical forest systems were most resilient to ‘natural’ events means that if we can’t stop human disturbances, at least we can attempt to emulate natural processes to maximise the rebound potential. Much like many modern forestry operations try to emulate natural disturbances to limit their damage, we should at least manage our impacts by understanding so-called ‘natural’ regimes as much as possible. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: deforestation, disturbance, Forest, recovery, resilience, restoration
Categories : Africa, agriculture, Amazon, biodiversity, climate change, conservation, deforestation, ecology, flood, habitat loss, logging, management, recovery, reforestation, research, tropical

New Threatened Species Commissioner lacks teeth

2 07 2014

This is not Gregory Andrews

Published today on ABC Environment.

—

Greg Hunt, the Coalition Government’s Minister for the Environment, today announced what appears to be one of the only environmental promises kept from their election campaign in 2013: to appoint a Threatened Species Commissioner.

The appointment is unprecedented for Australia – we have never had anything remotely like it in the past. However, I am also confident that this novelty will turn out to be one of the position’s only positives.

My scepticism is not based on my personal political or philosophical perspectives; rather, it arises from Coalition Government’s other unprecedented policies to destroy Australia’s environment. No other government in the last 50 years has mounted such a breath-taking War on the Environment. In the nine month’s since the Abbott Government took control, there has been a litany of backward and dangerous policies, from the well-known axing of the Climate Commission and their push to dump of 3 million tonnes of dredge on the World Heritage Great Barrier Reef, to their lesser-publicised proposals to remove the non-profit tax status of green organisations and kill the Environmental Defenders Office. The Government’s list of destructive, right-wing, anti-environmental policies is growing weekly, with no signs of abatement.

With this background, it should come as no surprise that considerable cynicism is emerging following the Minister’s announcement. Fears that another powerless pawn of the current government appear to have been realised with the appointment of Gregory Andrews as the Commissioner. Mr Andrews is a public servant (ironically from the now-defunct Department of Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency) and former diplomat who has some minor infamy regarding contentious comments he made in 2006 when acting as a senior bureaucrat in Mal Brough’s Department of Indigenous Affairs. Apart from Mr Gregory’s general lack of specific expertise in species recovery, the choice appears to be neutral at best.

More importantly, the major limitation of the Commissioner to realise real benefits for Australian biodiversity is the position’s total lack of political power. Greg Hunt himself confirmed that Mr Andrews will not be able to affect government policy other than ‘encourage’ cooperation between states and environmental groups. The position also comes with a (undisclosed) funding guarantee of only one year, which makes it sound more like an experiment in public relations than effective environmental policy. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 7 Comments »
Tags: Australia, biodiversity, environment, extinction, Gregory Andrews, mammals, recovery, threatened species
Categories : Australia, biodiversity, carbon, carbon trading, climate change, conservation, deforestation, ecology, environmental policy, extinction, governance, habitat loss, management

50/500 or 100/1000 debate not about time frame

26 06 2014

As you might recall, Dick Frankham, Barry Brook and I recently wrote a review in Biological Conservation challenging the status quo regarding the famous 50/500 ‘rule’ in conservation management (effective population size [N_e] = 50 to avoid inbreeding depression in the short-term, and N_e = 500 to retain the ability to evolve in perpetuity). Well, it inevitably led to some comments arising in the same journal, but we were only permitted by Biological Conservation to respond to one of them. In our opinion, the other comment was just as problematic, and only further muddied the waters, so it too required a response. In a first for me, we have therefore decided to publish our response on the arXiv pre-print server as well as here on ConservationBytes.com.

—

50/500 or 100/1000 debate is not about the time frame – Reply to Rosenfeld

cite as: Frankham, R, Bradshaw CJA, Brook BW. 2014. 50/500 or 100/1000 debate is not about the time frame – Reply to Rosenfeld. arXiv: 1406.6424 [q-bio.PE] 25 June 2014.

The Letter from Rosenfeld (2014) in response to Jamieson and Allendorf (2012) and Frankham et al. (2014) and related papers is misleading in places and requires clarification and correction, as follows: Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: 50/500 rule, conservation target, evolutionary potential, Genetics, inbreeding, management, minimum viable population size, MVP, population genetics, recovery
Categories : biodiversity, conservation, conservation biology, decline, ecological triage, extinction, extinction debt, extinction vortex, genetic diversity, genetics, management, minimum viable population, MPA, population viability analysis, PVA, recovery, restoration, synergies, threatened species

Restoring doomed fish

24 08 2012

I get called a doomsday merchant a lot, mainly because there’s not a lot of good news out there when it comes to biodiversity these days. However, now and again there is a success story worth shouting from the rooftops. This latest post comes from my PhD student, Jarod Lyon (also of the Arthur Rylah Institute in Victoria), who is working on restoring native freshwater fish in Australia’s largest river system – the Murray-Darling. The M-D also happens to be in a lot of trouble because of poor water management and years of neglect. However, some clever research and restoration proves that we can bring biodiversity back from the brink if done right. Jarod has posted here on Conservation Bytes before describing his work, and this latest post provides some detail on one species in particular.

—

Trout cod Maccullochella macquariensis were once considered to be widespread in the southern tributaries of the Murray-Darling Basin. However over the past fifty years, their distribution and abundance have declined dramatically, due to a number of disturbances including habitat loss, altered flow and temperature patterns, in-stream sedimentation, population fragmentation due to in-stream barriers and over fishing. Trout cod are listed nationally as endangered under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC Act 1999) and listed under the Victorian Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act (FFG Act 1988). Trout cod are often accidentally caught when fishing for Murray cod. However, it is illegal to take a trout cod while angling.

Trout cod were historically abundant in the lower Ovens River system in South-Eastern Australia, however were locally extinct by the 1980s. In an attempt to re-introduce a viable population in the Ovens River, hatchery-reared juvenile trout cod were stocked in the Ovens River system for ten years starting in 1997. Our recent manuscript published in Marine and Freshwater Research assesses the success of this stocking regime (particularly in relation to recovery plan objectives) through a variety of techniques, including fish surveys and analysis of gonads, otoliths and genetic structure of the population.

We found that the Ovens River now holds a naturally self-sustaining population of trout cod – that is, the progeny of stocked fishes are now breeding. Given that most threatened species re-introduction programs worldwide fail, this is somewhat of a good-news story for management of rare animals. In particular, we found that the length of the stocking program was a major factor in its success, as the long time period overcame the years where the survival of the stocked fingerlings was low. Interestingly, most fish to recruit to an adult size were stocked in 2003 or 2004 – meaning if this had been a five-year program, it would most likely have failed. Read the rest of this entry »